SlashGear Week in Review – Week 32 2008

The fight got dirty in the netbook arena this week, as Monday saw VIA's Nano CPU take on Intel's Atom with a 1080p smack-down video only to become mired in controversy when bloggers ran the tests themselves and came up with wildly different outcomes. Still, we had Lenovo's finally-official IdeaPad S10 and S9 to cheer us up, together with the rumor that Gigabyte plan a 10-inch dual-core version of the coveted M912 tablet-netbook.

Of course, ASUS couldn't bear to be out of the headlines for a single minute, and so announced the S101 (the size of an Eee, the branding of an Eee, but it's not an Eee) together with a cloud storage option. Netbooks are so much the niche of the moment that this week's "He Said, She Said" editorial was all about whether the best value comes from there or from a second-hand laptop off of eBay.

On the desktop, preliminary ASUS' Eee Box reviews showed that while the company might take some criticism for over-announcing, their tech really can be impressive all the same. We also saw an impressively monolithic Lego PC case, which for once isn't multi-colored.

Leaks, rumors and upcoming devices were much in evidence during the week, with the prospect of a 32GB iPhone 3G tipped after Toshiba announced a flash drive that size in half the space. We also heard about Intel's next-gen notebook platform, Capella, which is tipped for Q3 2009. Fujitsu navigated the FCC with their U820, the US version of the U2010 UMPC, while photos purporting to be the new MacBook casings showed up too.

In gaming, there was the usual blend of the sensible and the bizarre: the former satisfied by the news that Grand Theft Auto IV would finally get a PC release, the latter by libraries tempting young people through the doors with the promise of Guitar Hero.

Normally we leave most cellphone news to our sibling sites, PhoneMag and SlashPhone, but a few stories crossed over to SlashGear in the past few days. The week started with a demo video showing the difference in browsing speed between iPhone firmware 2.01, freshly released, and the existing firmware 2.0 (make sure to listen out for the Teen Choice awards in the background). It ended, however, with controversy over HTC, Google and the Android cellphone OS project, as the handset maker was forced to reiterate its Q4 2008 release schedule after analyst doubts. Conveniently we received a leaked video purporting to be the HTC Dream shortly after.

We've been running more than the usual amount of editorial content here on SlashGear over the past couple of weeks, and we'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Want more or prefer less? We're keen to keep bringing you the best in consumer electronics, so let us know what you think.